For a month after Jason Mitchell auditioned for “Straight Outta Compton,” he heard nothing. This did not do any favors for his level of patience.

“Oh my goodness. It was waiting for global warming was what it was,” the 28-year-old actor, who delivers a breakout performance as the late rapper Eazy-E, says with a laugh during a paired interview with director F. Gary Gray (who went to north suburban Highland Park High School), 46, at the Peninsula Hotel. “It was waiting on a huge iceberg to melt. It was great, though. It’s been a beautiful experience.”

And the movie’s good too. Opening Friday, “Straight Outta Compton” looks at the formation and breakup of influential rap group N.W.A., including Ice Cube (played by the rapper’s son O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) and Eazy-E (Mitchell), whose commentary on police misconduct sadly couldn’t be any more relevant today.

Gary, what comes to mind when you think of making “The Negotiator” in Chicago? What’s something that when you think of it, it makes you laugh or shake your head?

F. Gary Gray: Closing down Wacker. Closing down Wacker was, I think, an incredible feat on our production’s part because we had to ship in lights from other states. There wasn’t enough lighting in Chicago to light the whole canyon of buildings. And also it’s a little bit of home. I was raised in Los Angeles, but I went to high school here in Highland Park.

I’m from Deerfield.

FGG: OK, there you go. So you want to fight?

Yeah!

FGG: [Laughs.] We cool now, we’re cool!

We’re totally good.

FGG: I love Chicago. I love, love, love Chicago. If we could shoot more movies here, this is where I’d live. I loved doing “The Negotiator”—I brought it here because of my relationship with Chicago. My family lives here, my dad still lives here and this is a great city.

Jason, this is such a huge role for you. How did you react the first time you heard you got it, and what did you do to go celebrate?

Jason Mitchell: Oh, I was super ecstatic. I was super, super ecstatic. But Gary, he’s a super, super tough director. I love this guy, but he’s super tough. So immediately I went into [laughs] doing my homework. I did a lot of homework to get the role, but it was just work, work, work, work, work, work from there. I’m celebrating now.

You didn’t go out and party one night?

JM: Oh, absolutely not. [Laughs.]

If he covers his ears, will you tell me the truth about what you really did?

JM: It was kind of a delayed process. For any actor, you know, it’s a waiting game. It’s a hurry-up-and-wait type of thing. You kind of got to let go and let God [take over]. I did my audition, and then it was maybe a month before I heard back. When I did hear back, everything got really fast-paced, and I went from being on Skype with Gary doing my callback to being in Los Angeles doing a three-day bang-out with these guys doing different chemistry reads. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of fun, but it was a lot of work.

Before I ask Jason why you’re tough, why do you think he says you’re tough?

FGG: I think it’s because I pay attention to detail, and this is arguably the most important film of my life. I don’t have the luxury of working with Denzel Washington or Meryl Streep or whomever who has a ton of experience.

Meryl Streep would have been great in “Straight Outta Compton.”

JM: Absolutely. She would’ve killed it.

FGG: She would’ve. She can transform into Jerry Heller. She can do anything. It was important because it’s such an important story. It’s American history. This group changed the game, and they changed the world. It’s important for me to communicate to my artists that you can trust me. If I come onto the set and I’m lackadaisical about things and I don’t take it serious and they don’t feel how important it is to me, then they won’t feel safe to be vulnerable and they won’t feel safe that, “I’m in good hands.” Especially with the performance that he gave and they gave, it’s a very vulnerable place you have to put yourself in, and you have to trust the person at the helm. You have to. So I like to communicate to my crew, to the studio, to my artists, to my talent, to my actors that this is the most important thing in all of our lives creatively, and you can trust that if I am pushing you, I am pushing the next person and I am pushing myself. You establish that comfort, and they start to give you everything.

What’s a moment he was toughest on you?

JM: To be honest, he never let up. As a young actor you don’t realize how you have to drive a scene. Because my job was to come in and do my job every day, but his job is to see it on so much of a broader level. And he was letting us know while we were doing our boot camp in pre-screening and all that, he was letting us know that, “I’m not going to have time to direct you as much as you may think when we have 3,700 extras and we have all these different things to do.” So that amount of trust that he was talking about, he wanted to instill in us, we also had to instill that in him. And it wasn’t a thing where he would take it laying down. Like, “OK, all right, I get it, if you’re not going to let me trust you; we can’t trust each other.” It wasn’t like that. It was like, “This is my career, just like it’s your career. It’s going to have to come to a head.” [Laughs.]

FGG: It was a family thing, though. You can correct me if I’m wrong; it wasn’t a situation where I was tough where I was just an abusive dictator or anything like that. It was a situation where—it’s very easy for people to look at the subject matter or look at this genre and expect something that’s just on a certain level. But it was my job to point out how important this movie is, how important this story is, and to elevate it.

Don’t you feel like you can say the same about good rap? There are a lot of people who haven’t parsed out the good from the bad and wind up expecting one thing from all of it, but when you actually look at and listen to the artists who are good and have something to say, you might be surprised.

FGG: Kendrick Lamar is a great example of that. You have hip-hop artists coming out of the West Coast and you may expect one thing: barbecues, low riders and women and weight benches. But when you have someone who is bringing a certain level of consciousness and thoughtfulness and art to the craft, then all of a sudden you’re taken aback and forced to look at it differently. And that’s what I think Jason did and Shea and our cast, and I think also in the storytelling. You may expect one thing, but when you look closely these guys killed it, and then beyond that, if you zoom out a little bit and look at the movie and look at some of the metaphors, the movie is bigger than N.W.A.

I thought it was powerful last night at the Q&A when the interviewer mentioned Chief Keef, who three years ago was the hottest thing in town, but everyone was like, “Booo! Nooo!” Chance the Rapper is now the hottest thing in Chicago. Did that strike a chord with you the same way to see the sea change, since those artists represent something so different?

FGG: You know what I wish would happen more is that our society can put entertainment in the proper context.

JM: Right.

FGG: If we’re relying on children to raise our kids, if we’re relying on children in some cases and young men who are artists first, not leaders, they didn’t step up to say, “Hey, listen, we want to rebuild our nation.” They’re artists; I wish we could keep our entertainment in a proper context. Everybody has a different point of view, and I think artists should have the right to speak their minds. And you may not always agree with it, but this has been happening forever. You look at rock ’n’ roll, it’s the same thing. They thought the same thing: “Oh, this may be too much, this may challenge the system in place. It may not necessarily be all that positive depending on which artists you look at.” But certain artists reflect the times. And so if I’m going to listen to blues, I’m going to listen to jazz, I’m going to listen to rock ’n’ roll and now hip-hop, I’m going to look to some of that to be entertained first and foremost. I’m going to look to some of that to get a sense of what was going on at the time, not just what we want to hear. We don’t want just the politically correct, homogenized world that they want you to believe it is. We want a little bit of all of it, but we also want to keep it in the proper context. I want to look to first and foremost myself to have a positive experience in life. The one thing we have is the privilege of conscious choice. And what I mean by that is you can choose to listen to it or not. You can choose to properly keep it in its context or not. I don’t want to belabor the point, but I do feel like they put a lot of weight on hip-hop in ways they don’t do in other genres of music and also other elements of entertainment. You have to look at economics, you have to look at education, you have to look at our structure with leadership. They just put too much on entertainment.

JM: Right. And again, saying art is supposed to be a thing that makes opinion strong. That makes a lot of these things that makes our country strong and really relevant and really liberal and all these things that we stand for. It’s just supposed to be that. I don’t have anything against anybody for saying what you do like or what you don’t like, but when I see a Chance the Rapper or a Chief Keef, I look at them as two young, successful black men from Chicago who made it out of their situation, no matter what kind of music they make. I don’t listen to Sting everyday, but can I take anything from that? I don’t listen to Billy Joel, but can I take anything from that? It’s still art in its best fashion, no matter which way you look at it. I think it should be viewed in that form, but again that’s my opinion. I think it has to be a thing where it’s all viewed in the same way or not viewed at all.

A lot of people are talking about how relevant the movie still is—all the issues of police mistreatment and everything still happening. What’s the first memory you have of being aware of this issue, whether because of something that happened to you or someone you know involving the police, and what needs to happen to finally make a change?

FGG: Well, first and foremost I want to make sure that people understand this movie is not anti-law enforcement. It would be a mistake to think that we made a movie that is anti-law enforcement.

“Fuck tha Police” might have been a troubling title.

JM: [Laughs.]

FGG: Well, the movie’s not called “Fuck tha Police.” It’s called “Straight Outta Compton.” [Laughs.] Actually for myself, we feel there’s changes that need to happen in law enforcement and the culture. It’s really the culture, and there are a lot of as one writer calls, I think it’s a book called "On Combat," and he calls them peaceful warriors. There are a lot of peaceful warriors out there that are out there to serve and protect, and they deserve all the credit for protecting us.

How does that change then, so they’re the only ones working?

FGG: Well, this is real life, though. Like anything else you’re going to have the good and the bad. There is conversation right now, and I also feel like there needs to just be a shift in culture and law enforcement. Hopefully after you watch this movie, if you’re part of law enforcement, you maybe can encourage someone who is a partner who may be involved in excessive force or doing things that maybe’s not so fair. We’re all American citizens, period, first. So when it comes to racial profiling and things like that, when it comes to excessive force, when it comes to being unfair to any American, it doesn’t matter what color you are, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, hopefully you think twice. And I think there’s starting to be a shift. I’m hoping, and maybe I’m a little more optimistic than the next person. We’re shining a light on it, and Cube and the group did that, I think, in their way back in the ‘80s.

To get back to the original question, what was your first memory of being aware of this issue, directly or indirectly?

JM: I’m from New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s not a black-and-white type of thing down there. It’s a very cultural place. Everybody has the same accent. It’s not like if you’re white we can’t hang with you or anything like that. So it’s easy for us to call each other out on our things. They’ve had situations in New Orleans that are public, both good and bad with police that people aren’t afraid to get called out on because it’s a very old-fashioned place. I can remember being young and being outside and watch guys go through what they go through with the police, and old ladies come outside their house and be like, “Oh, Lord, they’re hitting him” or whatever is happening. You see it right in front of your face. I think it’s a thing where it shouldn’t be a racial thing or it shouldn’t be a code thing that I believe they have within the police. I think it should just be a moral thing. Are you OK with going home like this? Do you sleep better at night knowing that you let this go? These are questions people have to ask themselves. And police officers have to be real stand-up about it. Because you can find yourself in a situation as a police officer that you might feel that you’re the only one that should say something. It can be a situation.

FGG: I actually feel bad for the cops that are out there that are doing their job and doing the right thing and standing up and protecting and serving because they’re getting a bad rap from the few that stand out there and not necessarily do the right thing. I remember being younger and seeing the overcorrection in law enforcement. There’s obviously things that happen in the streets that fall into the category of crime and gangs and things like that, but not everyone from the streets that live in those environments are criminals. You see what I would call civilians become victims of this overcorrection. When you see it, when you experience it firsthand, it makes you feel like the playing field’s not even, and we’re seeing quite a bit of it. Like I said, I’m hoping that the playing field is shifting in the right direction because we all deserve to be treated fairly.

On that note, Highland Park doesn’t have a huge black community. Were there times when you were in high school and felt this was happening?

FGG: Not at all. Highland Park was like living in a John Hughes movie. [Laughs.] And living in L.A. was like living in a Hughes Brothers movie. You got “Pretty in Pink,” and you got “Menace II Society.” So I experienced a little bit of both. When you’re in Highland Park you get a chance to see what law enforcement should really be like. Again, we’re not trying to criticize all law enforcement. There’s guys out there that risk their lives every day to make sure that we live in a safe environment, and I want to give props to those guys who do that, but for the few that get out there and take out their stresses on innocent people, I think there should be a shift.

JM: Right. It’s not all right.

FGG: And if the culture in law enforcement promotes that, then we need a shift in culture.